Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery

Secrets and Mysteries

Starting from Touch - The Learned Astronomer - Moments - Voltaire - Secrets - from Song of Myself

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Starting from Touch

In his poetry, Walt Whitman asks simple questions, yet they are some of the most difficult questions we know: “To be in any form, what is that?”… “Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity” … “What is the grass?”

We know what it’s like to exist in human form. And we know what happens when we touch something: one part of our body (usually a finger) touches some other thing, after which we feel the surface, texture, heat, etc. of that thing. Yet when we look at the design behind this simple act, the situation becomes increasingly complex. The mechanics and chemistry of the skin — the millions of bacteria on top of it, the nerves and muscles beneath it, its connections to limbs, blood, heart, brain, limbic system, etc. — lead us toward questions about DNA, evolution, and the beginning of life in the universe.

In his long poem, Song of Myself (1855), Whitman explores connections between the self and the world around it:

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

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A full understanding of the simplest thing is the most complex thing in the world. If we start with this fact, it’s hard to assume that we really understand the meaning of the existence of anything.

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When I Heard the Learned Astronomer

— Walt Whitman, 1865

When I heard the learned astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

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Moments

Like Walt Whitman, most of us have heard the learned astronomer. Some of us stayed in our seats to listen to the facts. Some of us had the urge to walk out of the lecture hall, look up into the skies, and ponder the mysteries.

There’s something so beautiful, so unbelievable, about this life: the stretch of black space studded with tiny lights more powerful than a billion suns, the cool wind through the pine trees, the nightingale’s song, the beauty of a Grecian urn that teases us out of thought; the fabric of the molecules giving strength to the finger that lifts into the electric air and points to the floating moon.

It seems so unbelievable that the scientific explanation explains it all that we imagine there must be some further (not contrary), deeper, more poetical explanation for how it all holds together, and for the wonder of wondering at it all.

And then we shift back to the more permanent agnostic state, where the questioning of poetical proofs is an instinct grounded in the life of facts. As Keats put it in “Ode to a Nightingale,” the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to, deceiving elf.

We realize that we might want things to hold together miraculously in some sort of cosmic design, yet we understand that this is what we want, not necessarily the way things are. The universe may or may not be a unified thing, and it isn’t necessarily miraculous.

There may be a secret somewhere, but agnostics are sure they don’t possess it. They're also pretty sure that others don’t either.

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Voltaire

The doubt of agnosticism pre-dates Romantics like Keats and Transcendentalists like Whitman. It goes all the way back to early texts like Gilgamesh and the Vedas. It surfaces in Ancient Greek skeptics like Pyrrho and 18th century Deists like Voltaire. While the French philosophe believed in a faraway God figure, he stressed that we don’t know anything about this figure, and that it’s best to assume that we don’t know anything about the ultimate meaning of life. Voltaire believed in a Clockmaker God, yet in his fiction he did his best to show that it wasn’t humans who wound up the clock.

In Candide (1759), Voltaire presents us with a character called Pangloss, who glosses everything bad so that it can fit into his notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss argues, against all fact and disaster, and even in the rubble of the catastrophic earthquake of 1755 Lisbon, that our lives are somehow graced by a Cosmic Meaning. Yet at the end of the story the wise dervish literally and symbolically shuts the door in the face of this notion of human-centred Meaning:

Pangloss [addressed the famous dervish]: “Master, we come to entreat you to tell us why so strange an animal as man has been formed?” The dervish answered, “Why do you trouble your head about it? Is it any business of yours?” “But, Reverend Father,” said Candide, “there is a horrible deal of evil on the earth.” “What does it matter,” said the dervish, “whether there is evil or good? When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt does he trouble his head whether the rats in the vessel are at their ease or not?” “What must then be done?” said Pangloss. “Be silent,” answered the dervish. “I was hoping,” replied Pangloss, “to have reasoned a little with you on the causes and effects, on the best of possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, and a pre-established harmony.” At these words the dervish shut the door in their faces.

Pangloss porta la parole, et lui dit: « Maître, nous venons vous prier de nous dire pourquoi un aussi étrange animal que l’homme a été formé. — De quoi te mêles-tu ? lui dit le derviche; est-ce là ton affaire ? — Mais, mon révérend père, dit Candide, il y a horriblement de mal sur la terre. — Qu’importe, dit le derviche, qu’il y ait du mal ou du bien ? Quand Sa Hautesse envoie un vaisseau en Égypte, s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non ? — Que faut-il donc faire ? dit Pangloss. — Te taire, dit le derviche. — Je me flattais, dit Pangloss, de raisonner un peu avec vous des effets et des causes, du meilleur des mondes possibles, de l’origine du mal, de la nature de l’âme, et de l’harmonie préétablie. » Le derviche, à ces mots, leur ferma la porte au nez.

Voltaire makes a similar yet more all-encompassing point about Meaning at the end of his early sci-fi short story Micromégas (1752). While Candide’s dervish is wise but blunt, Micromégas is a gentle alien who doesn’t have the heart to slam the door in the face of human presumption:

The Saturnian once more lifted up the little mites [the humans], and Micromégas addressed them again with great kindness, though he was a little disgusted in the bottom of his heart at seeing such infinitely insignificant atoms so puffed up with pride. He promised to give them a rare book of philosophy, written in minute characters, for their special use, telling all that can be known of the ultimate essence of things, and he actually gave them the volume before his departure. It was carried to Paris and laid before the Academy of Sciences; but when the old secretary came to open it, the pages were blank. “Ah!” said he. “Just as I expected.”

Le Sirien reprit les petites mites; il leur parla encore avec beaucoup de bonté, quoiqu’il fût un peu fâché dans le fond du cœur de voir que les infiniment petits eussent un orgueil presque infiniment grand. Il leur promit de leur faire un beau livre de philosophie écrit fort menu pour leur usage, et que, dans ce livre, ils verraient le bout des choses. Effectivement, il leur donna ce volume avant son départ: on le porta à Paris à l’Académie des sciences; mais quand le vieux secrétaire l’eut ouvert, il ne vit rien qu’un livre tout blanc: « Ah ! dit-il, je m’en étais bien douté. »

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The Secret

They’ve all found The Secret: the Truth, in the Light, on the Way, only through Him.

Or they’ve found Buddha or Brahman, or Tao, that other Way.

Or they’ve found Science, magic decoder ring of riddles past, present, and future.

Or they’ve found politics, with its flame-thrower on the opium field of dreams.

Or they’ve found aestheticism, and left politics to the grubby likes of Sartre.

They’ve all found the Secret, except the agnostic, for whom there is, as of yet, no secret.

Or if there’s a secret, it’s still a secret and no one’s telling.

For the agnostic there are only mysteries,

endlessly revealing and unrevealing, endlessly dissolving and re-emerging.

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From Song of Myself

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

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Next: 🔬 Two Sides of the Fence

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